Data stored on a computer system typically requires periodic archival including deletion or movement to another storage device for a variety of reasons. Period archival may be any designated time duration. The criteria for this period management are often influenced by various factors including a company's data retention policies, end-user requirements, system capacity and performance.
In situations where a company controls or manages data on behalf of many other companies or organizations (e.g., government bodies, divisions, departments, different customers, or the like) identification of appropriate data objects and management of the archival of the data objects becomes problematic. Likewise, in a situation where a company has business reasons to segregate and manage data as separate and distinct objects, perhaps because of a diverse customer base for example, planning and executing a coherent archival policy that takes into account all of the different period archival and data object identification for the archival may become a significant challenge and complex.
Compounding this complexity may be requirements imposed by contractual arrangements or obligations which often occur due to business relationships or governmental policies. These requirements may be significantly different from one another. When a company is engaged in managing data on behalf of, or as a result of, such relationships or policies, the many different archival requirements may easily overwhelm a company that is obligated to perform regular archival. Tracking and assuring that compliance with all the different requirements is being met may become a daunting task.
Further, most archival programs today are typically developed, at additional cost, to address common functions inconsistently. That is, each archival program typically deals with identifying the set of data which is a candidate for archival, or deletion etc., according to its specific developed purpose, and deals with associated performance issues unilaterally without regard to any other archival program that may also be attempting to perform an archival function on a different set of data. This unilateral archival situation, which may involve many different archival programs, each typically targeted to a specific type or category of data, may strain computer system's throughput and performance and even impact primary non-archival applications' effectiveness or timeliness. Most of these programs have either coded management rules internally (making configuration costly) or developed proprietary means for configuration control.